We conducted a study on building-related respiratory disease and associated social impact in an office building with water incursions in the northeastern United States. An initial questionnaire had 67% participation (888/1,327). Compared with the U.S. adult population, prevalence ratios were 2.2-2.5 for wheezing, lifetime asthma, and current asthma, 3.3 for adult-onset asthma, and 3.4 for sympt...

This Health Hazard Evaluation (HHE) report and any recommendations made herein are for the specific facility evaluated and may not be universally applicable. Any recommendations made are not to be considered as final statements of NIOSH policy or of any agency or individual involved. Additional HHE reports are available at The employer shall post a copy of this report for a period of 30 calenda...

We investigate the feasibility of in-door next location prediction using sequences of previously visited locations and compare the efficiency of several prediction methods. The scenario concerns employees in an office building visiting offices in a regular fashion over some period of time. We model the scenario by different prediction techniques like Neural networks, Bayesian networks, State an...

OBJECTIVE To examine the relation between ventilation rate and occurrence of symptoms of the eyes, nose, throat, and skin as well as general symptoms such as lethargy and headache, often termed the sick building syndrome. METHODS A cross sectional population based study was carried out in 399 workers from 14 mechanically ventilated office buildings without air recirculation or humidification,...

Reducing energy consumption without compromising the quality of products in a pharmaceutical manufacturing environment and maintaining the comfort of employees is of critical important in maintaining the financial viability and competence of the company. Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system was identified as the major energy consumer in both office building and manufacturing ...

The research reported here was funded, in part, by the California Institute for Energy Efficiency (CIEE), a research unit of the University of California. Publication of research results does not imply CIEE endorsement of or agreement with these findings, nor that of any CIEE sponsor. This work was also supported by the Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Office of B...

Many innovative techniques and policy measures have been introduced to reduce energy consumption. Despite the high ambitions and societal pressures, the adoption rate of energy measures in office buildings is still low. Using adoption theories this paper provides a framework to analyse the adoption process of energy saving techniques in building processes. This framework is used to analyse the ...

Active participation of demand-side resources in power system control tasks, i.e., demand response, is expected to facilitate the integration of renewable energy sources in the grid. In this paper, we present a novel hierarchical control scheme to enable provision of frequency control reserves by a pool of office buildings managed by an aggregator. The reserves are provided by controlling the c...

The concept of Design-Build-Operate Energy Information Modeling (DBO-EIM) is proposed. The DBO-EIM aims at creating a detailed and persistent energy model that can be used to reduce energy consumption and improveoccupant comfort throughout the life-cycle of a building. Within the framework, the model is builtto supportdecision makingin the design phase, validated and tuned during construction a...

In this paper, we develop an agent-based model which integrates four important elements, i.e. organisational energy management policies/regulations, energy management technologies, electric appliances and equipment, and human behaviour, based on a case study, to simulate the energy consumption in office buildings. With the model, we test the effectiveness of different energy management strategi...